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Bridget Jones said it best. Wobbly bits. We’ve all got bits about ourselves that we don’t exactly love.

And the older we get, the more those bits seems to be in garish focus when I look in the mirror. I’m the girl that all you other girls hate. I’ve been trying to *gain* 5lbs for the last 9 months. Everyone says I look fine the way I am now, but I’m actually used to rocking 15 more lbs and it looks and feels weird to me. My clothes don’t fit. For a while I thought I looked like Skeletor. Some things are floppy. I’m a floppy Skeletor.

And I project like an emeffer. If I don’t feel good about the way I look, I assume the boy feels the same way.

Which is almost never actually the case.

As it turns out, he likes the wobbly bits. All our men, all men, like wobbly bits.

And the same for the ladies. We like a man’s wobbly bits. You know, it’s why we’re with each other.

So as it turns out, the reflection we see in the mirror is not necessarily the image others see when they look at us. I’m wondering how many of you feel the same? How much of your self-image is informed by insecurity like mine? I keep hearing that being 30 is all about being comfortable with who you are, so is this something we’ll ever grow out of?

10 Responses to “My Wobbly Bits and What He Thinks of Them”

I thought I had grown out of it, but the last few weeks have made is immensely apparent that I have not. I have reverted. In fact, it had been a long time since I felt so inspired to have an eating disorder. However, now that I am 33, I also have an excellent therapist and excellent friends who put up with my freak outs and encourage me to stop beating myself up. I don’t know if I will, but I’ll keep trying.

I wish I were a vampire so my body wouldn’t show up in the mirror. The older I get, the more my metabolism hits the breaks, the more my vision fails, the more my hair turns gray, I find myself having to be a lot more comfortable with who I am on the inside because I’m a lot less comfortable with who I am on the outside.

You know I’ve spent the last 6 months working on losing 30 pounds, right? Because I weighed that when my youngest was 8 months old and I, in my infinite wisdom, said WOULDN’T IT BE FUN TO WEIGH AS MUCH AS I DID PREGNANT? and gained it all back.

I’ve been with the husband-type for 11 years now (what the what?!) and so he’s seen me from normal to the fun anorexic time I decided to try out through pregnancy and post pregnancy and all that in between shit. It’s weird to feel like a tank and have him trying to jump my bones nearly every minute of the day– including in his sleep, which is both funny and annoying– because I always want to yell WTF SHOULDN’T YOU BE FINDING ME REPULSIVE TOO?

It doesn’t help that I have the self-esteem of one of those hairless dogs that wins the World’s Ugliest Dog competition every year. I’m still looking for lighting that will make me look air brushed every time I look in the mirror, where he rolls over in the morning with a boner and thinks I’m the hottest shit on earth at 7AM.

I want to believe the same of me that he does, but I don’t know if it’s possible after living as MYSELF for so long.

Gaining fat weight or muscle weight though? I have the mixed blessing of not caring much how my body looks but always getting worked up over what it CANNOT do. Being healthy but classified as underweight messes up one’s mind. I only recently reached the triple digits in pounds, and it feels great. It probably takes some sort of concrete accomplishment to age confidently. Never will I ever go back to double digits.

Wobbly bits are something I got used to before I even had them. My mother taught me all about self-esteem and the damage it can do to relationships if you don’t have any.

As a young girl (pre 16) I was tall and lanky. I had no boobs, which was always tough around my beautiful busty gal pals. My legs were always whiter than the rest of my body despite the amount of sun I exposed them to. I never said anything about my insecurities, because I was spending so much time reassuring my mom, and all of my girlfriends that they were in fact “beautiful, and any guy would be crazy not to want them!”

My dear mother has thighs that could feed a small army, and I seem to resemble her more each day. (Though I think us kids were the largest contributing factor to her curves, and I have yet to have any children.) She told me once that when she and my dad were younger he bought her a sexy neglige…right off of the manequin. It was a size six- she, a size 12. At first she was mortified, but came later to realize that when my dad saw the manequin, that is how he saw my mom. “Men see what they want to see Liz…and your dad saw a size 6.”

Since then, I have chosen not to pick myself apart. Afterall, if I don’t do it, then hopefully my hunny will still see a size six in the bedroom.

P.S. In case you were all wondering- my legs are still white, but my boobs have come along quite nicely.